


What's in a Dance

by andromedia5



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Batfamily (DCU) Feels, Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Cassandra Cain Appreciation, Cassandra Cain Needs a Hug, Good Sibling Cassandra Cain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-18 03:01:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29727345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andromedia5/pseuds/andromedia5
Summary: They’re speaking.The ballerinas are speaking with their bodies, so over exaggerated that she understands everything and it takes nothing. None of the words that have to fight through her mind to get to her mouth. Just pretty dresses and quick feet and music without words and it’s . . . beautiful.
Relationships: Cassandra Cain & Bruce Wayne, Cassandra Cain & Dick Grayson, Cassandra Cain & Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown & Cassandra Cain & Tim Drake & Dick Grayson & Jason Todd & Damian Wayne
Kudos: 17





	What's in a Dance

They’re speaking.

The ballerinas are speaking with their bodies, so over exaggerated that she understands everything and it takes nothing. None of the words that have to fight through her mind to get to her mouth. Just pretty dresses and quick feet and music without words and it’s . . . beautiful.

She reaches for Bruce’s hand and squeezes, letting him anchor her to the world as the colors and the light and the life wash over her. He’s smiling at her; happy, calm, nervous.

Always nervous around her, but different nervous, hopeful nervous. 

Hopeful nervous again, when she opens the ballet studio door to see him, sitting there waiting for her. He gets up, folding his newspaper under his arm.

“How’d it go, Cassie?”

She’s flung her arms around his neck before he can get another word out.

Bruce knocks at her door a few weeks after she starts ballet lessons with Madame Naomi while she’s lying on her bed listening to Tom Petty. Not just listening, listening with both headphones in and the volume up and her eyes closed letting _Wildflowers_ wash over her and block out the rest of the world because she’s safe. He sits at the foot of her bed when she motions for him to come in and tugs at her feet teasingly, so her knees drop back down onto the bedspread. Cassandra pauses her music and takes her earbuds out, pushing back the hair that had gotten tangled in the wire.

“Good morning,”

“It’s not morning,” he points out, tilting his head towards the clock on her bedside table proudly displaying that it is in fact 2:25 and therefore; _not_ morning.

“Happy see today,” That isn’t right, she knows it isn’t, it’s not complete and her mind starts to chase after the right words. Bruce runs a thumb over her knuckles soothingly.

“Take your time, sweetheart,”

Cass tries to slow down the words running through her mind so she can see them clearly. “Happy first time seeing me today,”

His eyes crinkle at the sides and he kisses her forehead “That, I am. Can you come down to the library with me for a second?”

She nods and swung her legs off the bed, following him out the door. Last time they had gone down to the library for a second it had been when he had given her that pair of his mother’s earrings. They had belonged to her grandmother before her and he had thought she would have wanted her granddaughter to have them but if she didn’t want them it was completely fine and they were old anyways and she didn’t even have her ears pierced so- at which point she had stopped listening to his rambling in favor of staring at the delicate gold flowers with the sapphires in the centers. Dick pierced her ears in his apartment a week later with a sewing needle and an ice cube and while he argued with a livid Alfred over the phone about how “It’s completely safe” and “That’s how I got my ears pierced at the circus,” Kory helped her put in the earrings and that glorious sense of belonging had washed over her, again.

The library smells of almond and old paper, sunlight drenching the leather armchairs and bouncing off the old grandfather clock. Cassandra lingers at the doorway watching as Bruce strides over to the old record player, carefully lowering a record onto it and turning to her. “You said you wanted to come to the gala this Saturday?” Something in her brain clicks as she realizes why they’re here and rushes over to him eagerly. “You don’t have to go if you changed your mind” he continues, “But I thought you might want to learn,”

“Different dancing,”

“Alfred made me go to lessons when I was your age but the last teacher filed a restraining order after I tried to send Jason when he was fourteen and he . . . well, you know your brother, you can imagine,” he turns and sets the needle on the record. Piano notes begin to play, simple and elegant like the way Tim’s fingers move across the shiny white and black keys.

“ _Clair de Lune_ , it’s a waltz but a very slow one, it’s easier to learn.” Bruce extends one of his hands and she holds it. Their hands look funny together, one tan and small, with uniform circular calluses and the other large and scarred with a thin dusting of hair up the back of his palm. “Now you put your hand on my shoulder,” he instructs as he rests his other hand on her waist and lower back, a bit like a hug. 

She does so, albeit a bit impatiently “This isn’t dancing,”.

Bruce laughs and she pokes his shin with her toe as if it would wake his feet up and make them move. “We’re getting there. Now a waltz is mostly just a box step. There can be other elements but at its core it's just a box step. So we move back,” he gestured for her to take a step backward and then followed her with a step forward. “To the side,” they both side stepped in unison, “Foreword for you, back for me. And then to the side again and we’re back where we started.”

Cassandra looks up from where she had been tracking the movement of their feet in an attempt to memorize. It was surprisingly like a kata, or the five positions in ballet, simple. Maybe it was just that what she had seen had looked more like dancing than it actually was.

“That’s it?” she asks, trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice. He rolls his eyes and begins the box step again but faster this time, and this feels like what she’s seen other people do, the almost rise and fall of it, like a carousel. She trips over her feet a little but he holds her, not letting her fall until she’s memorized the rhythm of the steps. The same rush of euphoria she always gets from dancing comes swooping in as herfather spins her into the light shining through the curtains.

They’re whispering, always whispering.

Cass has learnt a lot since leaving Cain. She’s learnt to speak English, she’s learnt to speak. She’s learnt that people don’t like her. Not for the bad things she’s done, not for Cain. Just don’t like her. 

Jealousy.

That’s what she’s told causes it, first by Alfred, who merely pats her cheek and makes a passing remark about the green eyed monster coming after kind, pretty girls. 

She can tell he’s lying. 

Then again by Steph, “Bruce is rich, Cass. All rich people want to be richer. Well, except your dad, but maybe he’s so rich it skips him. That’s why those harpy faced bitches with earrings that could pay my tuition don’t like you. Ignore it,”.

She isn’t lying. But Steph hasn’t seen.

Jason doesn’t say it’s jealousy. Jason doesn’t really answer, just laughs that laugh where he doesn’t really think it’s funny and mutters something in Spanish. 

_“Gringo cabrones._ They never fucking change, do they, Cassie?”

She learns the way she learns a lot of things that no one could even begin to explain to her; a combination of TV and Tim. An episode of Boy Meets World and now she at least knows what questions to ask, which he answers. Cold anger and no small amount of what’s either sadness or guilt (it might be both) in his pretty eyes as he does his best to explain. He has the same look now, knuckles white as the old women sitting at the table near them get drunker and louder. Like birds on a tree branch, but the birds that like to sit outside her bedroom window don’t say her name quite so often or so mockingly. Tim stomps away while one of the board members she and Steph have christened “Mr. Suckup With The Sex Offender Mustache” is in the middle of saying something and walks straight to her.

“Dance with me?” he asks, much louder than he needs to. Tim’s hand is cold in hers but it’s there and he follows her into a waltz, the four corners of the invisible handkerchief marking out the box step. “Can you let me lead?” he whines and this is that thing Barbara says about the elephant. When people don’t talk about something they both see. But it doesn’t feel like lies and it doesn’t feel uncomfortable anymore. It feels like that pushing at her chest; the growing pains because she’s still adjusting to loving someone this much. 

“Little brother,” she reminds him just in case he wasn’t getting ‘not a chance’ from her face, and Tim grins and squeezes her hand. Cass isn’t sure if the whispering stops or if she just can’t hear them anymore.


End file.
